If you’ve followed the discussion after that last post (I love those replies), you’d have seen Cathy’s on Sternbergia – an Autumn-flowering crocus-like thing. It had me trawling through pics t ...
I’m in search of the perfect companion for my colchicums. They’ve been in flower since the last week of Feb and are looking distinctly lonely (image above). The trouble is, they flower without a ...
I’m really missing the days of untrammelled plant acquisitiveness. They were the glory days – that period of time when I lived in one big happy world of new and interesting plants – all of whi ...
I heard back from Brian Minter at Minter Gardens, and the black stemmed grass I wrote about a couple of posts ago (check it out here), isn’t a Miscanthus at all. It’s a Pennisetum, and one named ...
By some outrageous and undeserved privilege I made my first visit to Chanticleer, just outside of Philadelphia, in our spring – their autumn – last year. I think that I’d vaguely and prejudicial ...
Seems like some climbers are happier when they’re going up, and others when they’re going out. The wisteria I kept going on about back in early summer absolutely rocketed up its wire, but lost i ...
I’d clearly been lulled into a false sense of familiarity with the genus Miscanthus. I mean, after lifting and dividing hundreds of them, cutting back possibly millions of individual stems, search ...
I’m currently deep inside Prince Charles’ book Harmony which, to put it very roughly indeed, explores issues of sustainability. The whole time I’m reading, I’m thinking about how this relates ...
I’ve never had any problem remembering the name of this fabulous sedum. I can’t, even if I wanted to, shake the lingering images of Steve Martin playing Prince Ruprecht in Dirty Rotten Scoundrel ...
Most plants present their floral colour in a way that is irritatingly, or at least disappointingly, diffuse. This is never more obvious than when you take a photo of a plant or combination of plants ...
Beginners over-read some bits of advice, and under-read others. At least that’s my observation from my admittedly smallish beginner sample of one – myself, thirty years ago. I remember leaving ...
I love what they do with pots in the UK and through North America – the large, mixed pot thing, in which a whole lot of complementary plants are thrown in together, and jostle it out for the summer. ...
Somerset Maugham wrote in his ‘The Summing Up’ that the only safe place to be in regard to ideas is to have so many of them that you don’t place too much weight on any particular one of them. ...
One of the truly great, anticipation-charged moments in the garden year looms. The first of the bulb catalogues has appeared. What’s on offer are brown, flaky, often ugly or even grotesque littl ...
I’m a complete sucker for an annual climber. This isn’t, like many of my inner horticultural longings, borne out in my actual garden. But they call to me, nevertheless. One day I swear I’m g ...
Clearly there’s supernatural forces attached to blogging. It seems as if by making any form of declaration or assertion, wild or conservative (I’ve a habitual preference for the former), your ex ...
Between two writing deadlines I snatched half an hour to progress a foot or two in removing the residue of an old potato crop from a garden bed. This is the third time the bed has been dug over, try ...